From LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

EJCIM 2020 will take place in web-conference format spread over two weeks (mostly the mornings) from 8 to 19 June 2020. Registration is free but nevertheless required.More information, here.

The school has been held every year since 1996 in different towns to bring together young researchers working in Mathematical Computing. The school's principal objective is to contribute to a high level education for the young doctoral students, complementing that of their universities. This may be by bringing them up to date in some fields of their research or introducing them to new subjects. By presenting them with the state of the art in subjects close to their speciality, we give them tools to adapt better to varied environments (useful for instance before progressing to a postdoc), thereby contributing to their mobility.

26 May 2020 -
Bruno Courcelle has been awarded the «S. Barry Cooper» prize given by the Computability in Europe Association.

This prize aims to reward works providing «a wide understanding and a fundamental study on computability, thanks to excellent results, and establishing a theory likely to endure, exceptional services given to the concerned community or a combination of these elements. ».Bruno Courcelle is the first to receive this prize. It recognises the whole of his work on second-order monadic logic applied to graphs structured in tree form and the construction of algorithms, and in particular, to the synthesis of these works published in a book written with J. Engelfriet (University of Leyden) entitled Graph structure and monadic second-order logic, 2012.

IWOCA 2020 is maintained for the dates of 8 to 10 June 2020, but will be conducted as a visioconference. Registration is free but still obligatory.

Since its creation in 1989 under the name of AWOCA (Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms), IWOCA offers an annual forum for researchers designing algorithms for the many combinatorial algorithms lying behind computing applications in the fields of science, engineering and business. Previous meetings of IWOCA and AWOCA have taken place in Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Indonesia, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Previous IWOCA can be consulted here.More information here.

In this period when digital applications pose more and more ethical and legal questions, we will have the 2020 "Convergences du Droit et du Numérique", with an enlarged team. The aim: make computer professionals talk about law, and make lawyers talk about computing... and it works !The 2020 event, like its predecessors, will be organised in two sessions:• from 16 to 18 March 2020, athere will be a workshop allowing the joint exploration of three or four themes and the creation of transdisciplinary working partnerships;• from 12 to 14 October 2020, there will be a colloquium for feedback from the work of these transdisciplinary working partnerships and their enrichment by the contributions of the participants.[[<<] See the site here.

The 2020 meeting, will take place, as in all years, at the LaBRI, from Wednesday 5 to Friday 7 February 2020. The Bordeaux Combinatorics Days are an annual occasion for information and exchanges between researchers in the discipline. These days will include around 15 scientific presentations, leaving time as usual for exchanges between participants. Consulte the site here.

The Academy of Science has just elected 18 new members. Among them, in the Mathematics section, Mireille Bousquet-Mélou (CombAlgo team) has been distinguished.These results are soon to be ratified by an official decree of the President of the Republic. The admission ceremony for the newly elected members will take place on Tuesday 2 June 2020, at the Institut de France. Press Release here.

16 December 2019 -
Visit to the LaBRI by a Japanese delegation from the University of Tsukuba, Friday 20 December 2019

On this occasion, there will be a workshop to present our respective work on themes related to AI. The objective of this meeting is to identify opportunities for future collaboration. Doctoral students from Tsukuba will be present. LaBRI doctoral students considering an external mobility are invited to take part.Programme of the day, here.

09 July 2019 -
New victory for the Rhoban team, world champion for the fourth successive time

After its triple world champion title (2016, 2017 and 2018), Rhoban has added a new star to its record in the KidSize humanoid robot category.This year, it was in Sydney that the team defended its title and won a victory against the Chinese team.The results are here.The next championship RoboCup 2020 will be on home ground, in Bordeaux.

Next 24 May, at the UGECAM Aquitaine La Tour de Gassies, there will be a workshop involving multidisciplinary teams.Supported by the CNRS RoBioVis project, within the programme « Osez Interdisciplinarité », in collaboration with the medical teams of the UGECAM Aquitaine La Tour de Gassies, the Percy Army Hospital Armées and with the Aquitaine ADEPA, multidisciplinary teams INCIA Hybride, Inria Flowers, LaBRI AIV are working on new generation robotic hybrid prostheses, guided by both vision and EMG.More information and programme here.

23 April 2019 -
Multilayer networks and visualisation help in the work of investigation and analysis of criminal metworks

The GIP Research Mission Law and Justice has financed the AVRES project "Analyse et Visualisation des réseaux criminels de traite des êtres humains", led by Bénédicte Lavaud-Legendre of COMPTRASEC UMR 5114, and involoving thle LaBRI (Bruno Pinaud, Guy Mélançon). This work, initiated in 2015-2016 by a PEPS IdEx (project TETRUM), interests the legal community (magistrates, investigtors) as is confirmed by the apparition of an article in the Figaro, ici. This same work is at the origin of a valorisation project in common with AST (code name "IntuiNet") involving two young collaborators: Jason Vallet (doctor UB) and Norbert Féron (computing master). The project is aimed at developing a platform to enable analysis and visualisation of data in networks. The potential applications intended are analysis of criminal networks, analysis of social networks in the context of social innovation (in connection with the H2020 opencare project), economic intelligence (patent databases, with Gretha), and investigative journalism.

Bruno Pinaud and Guy Mélançon are also collaborating with the Lausanne criminal science school (a visit by Quentin Rossy next May financed by the LaBRI as an emerging action).

Digital Aquitaine, the LaBRI, Inria Bx Sud-Ouest, Bordeaux INP, the CNRS, the CATIE, the University of Bordeaux and the IMS are organising a seminar on Blockchain Technology, on Tuesday 21 May at the LaBRI.This technology, still young, but very promising will impact on the manner in which we share information. Thanks to its properties and highly decentralised aspect, it is possible to stock, execute and above all certify transactions.However, Blockchain is only the concept, and there are many implementations, each giving rise to possibilities but equally problems to be resolved.

An international Top_100_AI classification has recently been published by Aminer.Laurent Simon in the AI category IA, Vincent Lepetit in the Computer Vision category and Meghyn Bienvenu in the Web and Knowledge Engineering category .

AMiner's annual list of the most influential researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) lists the world's best researchers in the AI domain. The list is determined in recognition of exceptional technical achievements having lasting contribution and impact in the research world.In 2018, the winners are part of the most cited researchers whose articles have been published in the most important disciplines of their respective domain between 2007 and 2017. The winners are determined automatically by the AMiner system in function of the number of citations obtained by their best publications. In particular, the "Artificial Intelligence" list classes researchers according to their number of citations between 2007 and 2017 in the AAAI and IJCAI conferences, regarded as the most important in the field.

26 March 2019 -
Best Paper Award at STOC 2019

The article “The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary” by Wojciech Czerwinski, Slawomir Lasota, Ranko Lazic, Jérôme Leroux and Filip Mazowiecki will receive the Best Paper Award at the 51st ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC’19), which will take place from the 23rd to 26th June 2019, in Phoenix, AZ.

This work, financed in part by the ANR BraVAS project concerns Petri nets (or vector addition systems), a classical model of competition, largely studied and used in automatic verification, with numerous applications in modeling and in analysis of hardware systems, software, data bases, as well as in chemical, biological and economic processes .

On Januar 15 2019, at 6pm, in the LaBRI amphi, Jean-Marc Chouvel will give a seminar whose title is: "La conscience du temps est-elle informatisable?".It will address the mechanisms of our consciousness which contribute to our structuring of events perceived in time so as to give them sense. Jean-Marc Chouvel, composer and musicologist will offer us his vision and his questions on this subject.

The seminar will be followed by a concert-meeting (in the Hémicyclia room). SCRIME and Jean-Michel Rivet have invited Octandre.- concert: diffusion of acousmatic pieces by Victoire Cid and Paul Husky.- meeting: a presentation of their works and creative methods and exchanges with the public.

On 29/11 at 7pm, at the UGC cinema in Talence, some of our LaBRI colleagues, creators of start-ups (notably SImbals and NFC-i) will be participating in this event, in the presence of Emmanuel Sallaberry, Mayor of Talence and Marc Labourdette, Economy vice-mayor. This convention is an opportunity to look at an annual account of the economic activity of the town, look at current projects and present the town's economic actors.

On the afternoons of 23 and 24 November 2018, the LaBRI will be present at Hangar 14, to give demonstrations of drones and robots which clean up green spaces. Indeed, they are not just toys, they even collect your rubbish!Come to the demonstrations of drones which might be used in the near future.This novel and free experience will be one of the highlights of the ZZ Festival, Zero rubbish Zero waste, organised by Bordeaux Métropole.

Gérard Berry, who holds the chair "Algorithms, Machines and languages" of the Collège de France, will give his first course of the year 2018-2019 : "Where is Computing going?", in Talence (Agora Haut Carré), on Thursday 13 December at 4pm.His course will be followed by a seminar run by Yves Bertot (Inria Sophia-Antipolis) and Pierre Castéran (LaBRI) from 5:30pm.The course and the seminar are open to all. Nevertheless registration is preferable.For more information and to register see here.

Over the years this conference has established itself as a reference in the security of systems, networks and applications. Open systems, their interconnection and their uses make them more and more the prime targets of attacks of all kinds. Securing them, detecting attacks on them and designing effective solutions to install counter-measures are permanent challenges. New technologies and new attacks linked with cybercriminality necessitate theoretical and practical research

The LaBRI will be holding open day for a wide public of school students, for the Fête de la Science, which will take place from Monday 8 to Friday 12 October 2018.Come and discover the various workshops on offer during this event. We will welcome you, subject to availability of places.

After two missions undertaken to Toronto and then Montreal, under the auspices of the New Aquitaine Region, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bordeaux Métropole's FrenchTech and CCI Internationale, NFC-I, a LaBRI start-up, has been selected by the largest nursery in Montreal, the Centech (Centre d'Entrepreneurship Technologique) connected with l’ETS (Ecole de Technologie Supérieure) which has more than 10,000 students,about 650 doctoral students and 200 researchers.The society thus has available an office in Montreal and is starting a 12 week acceleration programme which should lead to its effective installation across the Atlantic between now and the end of the year. NFC-I is also continuing its growth, and has just recruited a Marketing and Communication agent and a Business Developer.

The IRIM consortium of the GDR ISIS groups several French laboratories and has participated for many years in the international evaluation campaign TRECVID.This campaign is devoted to research in automatic segmentation, indexing, and context-based retrieval of massive video datasets.
One of the tasks, INS « Instance Search » consists of finding persons in predefined contexts inside these massive video datasets (475K shots for a total length of 435 hours this year).

The IRIM consortium coordinated by the LABRI (Boris Mansencal, Jenny Benois-Pineau), with help of LIMSI, finished, for the second time, 2nd out of 7 international teams in this INS task in 2018.

13 July 2018 -
The idex awards its 2018 science and technology prize to a Progress doctoral student

Joachim Bruneau-Queyreix (Progress team) has received the University of Bordeaux, science and technology prize, for his work on multi-criteria optimisation of streaming vidéo in the internet Future Media. He will give a presentation of his thesis work to the Bordeaux university doctoral students, at their year start ceremony, on 6 december next.

Simon Da Silva, a Progress team doctoral student, presented an article and gave a demo at the 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV'18) of the ACM MMSys (Multimedia Systems) 2018 conference, in Amsterdam (Netherlands).The article's title is: MUSLIN: Achieving High, Fairly Shared QoE Through Multi-Source Live Streaming. It is the fruit of a collaboration between five researchers of the Progress team (S. Silva, J. Bruneau-Queyreix, M. Lacaud, D. Négru, L. Réveillère).The objective of this work is to improve the diffusion of video flux in real time (live streaming). For this, the solution of multi-source diffusion MS-Stream, developed in the Progress team, is used in combination with algorithms for dynamic provision and assignment of video content servers. This streaming system allows a significant improvement in the quality of expérience of users while reducing the infrastructure costs for the content provider compared with current solutions.For this work, these five researchers won the prix Excellence in DASH Award, third place, awarded by the DASH-IF. This prize rewards research work and potential applications in the streaming video industry (Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, etc.).

While the human football world championship is under way, the cheers can be heard in other venues. The Rhoban team of robot footballers, double world champion (in 2016 and 2017), defended its title at Robocup 2018, held this year in Montreal.For the third consecutive year, it received the title of world champion with its KidSize humanoid robots.This new victory can only enthuse and encourage dans le succès qui est le leur, d’autant plus que la ville de Bordeaux a été choisie pour accueillir la RoboCup 2020.

The international RoboCup committee announced the news, on Monday 18/06 from Montreal where the RoboCup 2018 is currently taking place.It is now official, the city of Bordeaux has been chosen to host RoboCup, the robot world cup, in 2020.A few figures: 45 countries will be represented, 450 teams (researchers, students, companies), 5000 robots will confront each other for a week in various disciplines: football, catastrophe rescue, industrial logistics, personal assistance; 3500 participants and also 40000 visitors.The organisation committee for this candidature, of which Olivier Ly is one of the principal contributors, can be congratulated for this excellent news for Bordeaux and the LaBRI Rhoban.

The SCRIME Arts and Sciences Cycles are annual events where the various research and creation projects in which the SCRIME is involved, are presented to an audience of professionals, and our partners. It is an opportunity to demonstrate over several days the progress of some of the projects which have occupied the last year. This event is also open to the public subject to availability of places.

This interactive map uses technology for treatment and visualisation of massive data developed at the LaBRI. It allows geolocalisation of candidates' confirmed choices. In the case of selective courses, only choices which have a positive response are shown.

The first X-ray image has been obtained in the X-Pulse project in Vincent Beaudoux's doctoral research supervised by Guillaume Blin and Christina Zacharatou (Institut Bergonié) which aims to find an alternative to laser based mammography. The X-Pulse project aims to develop a novel system of medical imagery by X-rays using intense lasers of strong mean power, for an application in early detection of breast cancer. This project, financed by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region and the FEDER, brings together a consortium of doctors, radio therapists, researchers and engineers (ALPhANOV, Amplitude Laser Group, Imagine Optic, the CELIA, the LaBRI and the Bergonié Institut) SHOULD lead to the creation of a prototype of mammograph based on the use of intense lasers.The objective is to allow earlier detection of small breast cancers using weak doses thanks to the use of a new technique of phase contrast imagery made possible by the use of intense laser generated X-ray sources developed as part of the project.On 29 march, the first image produced with the MetalJet source was obtained by AlphaNov.

Professor Mark V. Lawson, from Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh), an algebraicist, and specialist in formal language theory and inversive semigroups, visiting the LaBRI during April with support from the University of Bordeaux, is giving a series of talks in the context of the EDMI on the extension of «Stone's duality» to the non-commutative case on Monday 9, 16 et 23 April from 2 to 4pm, in room 076.Stone's duality is a concept connected with many domains of Computing: from automata theory to the semantics of programming languages passing through modelling of complex systems. This series of courses by Mark V. Lawson, whose pedagogical talents are known will allow us to grasp the essential of the associated concepts.

The ANR BLIZAAR Project of which Bruno Pinaud (équipe BKB) is the scientific leader, in collaboration with their Luxemburg colleagues, have just been awarded a Dagstuhl seminar. This prestigious German organisation finances the organisation of high level international scientific seminars. The seminar to take place in February 2019 and entitled "Visual Analytics of Multilayer Networks Across Disciplines", will bear on the importance and challenges of multi-level network visualisation as tool for trans-disciplinary modeling. It will bring together academic and industrial experts (40-45 people) internationally renowned in the domains of data visualisation and the study of complex systems, and also experts in potential application domains such as geography, biology, economics, sociology, etc.This seminar is an opportunity to forge new partnerships, and will equally enable implication in applying for European and bilateral projects. It often leads to an important publication notably allowing an international visibility for work carried out at the LaBRI.

As it does every year, the LaBRI is organising the Journées de combinatoire de Bordeaux. In 2018 they will take place from 12 to 14 February. On the menu, around fifteen talks on all types of comlbinatorics: enumerative, algebraic, probabilistic... with varying applications.